Cradle To Coffin
by Unoriginality
Summary: Hohenheim knows that Dante does not deserve her son.


_"What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin."_

That woman did not deserve this.

It was tragic, really, that that was his first thought upon hearing his son's idea, but it crossed his mind all the same and stayed there, repeating itself on a loop as his son excitedly explained his idea for a gift for his mother.

That woman did not deserve this sort of devotion or love.

It had not taken long to see that Dante resented their son to the point of cold and thinly-veiled hostility, and the boy never understood her actions, the way she spoke to him, when she even bothered to acknowledge him at all. Hohenheim, on the other hand, adored the boy, his golden smile and that keen brilliance that he recognized from his own youth.

Perhaps it was purely egoism for how much the boy was a reflection of himself that caused his adoration, but he highly doubted it. For as logical as that answer seemed, it simply did not _feel_ right. He was a scientist, certainly, but he'd learned over the last three-quarters century that even though everything, even emotions, could be very logical in nature, there always was and always would be a bit of chaos threaded through it, something wholly _il_logical and impossible to predict.

Dante's emotions, unfortunately, were not so illogical to guess at the reason for. She was jealous, bitterly envious of the attention that Hohenheim gave their son that she'd once had a sort of totalitarian dominance over, and it was eating her alive. It hurt him to see it; part of him very much missed the woman he'd loved that had seemed to completely disappear since she gave birth-

_(she was never that, really, it's me that's changed; I'm getting a glimpse of life outside of my experiments and that woman)_

-and she never failed, however subtly and wordlessly, to remind him that it was his fault for continuing to make an effort to be a father to the boy.

She always managed to push it down to a 'him or me' choice, and in the end Hohenheim always favored his son, put off by Dante's emulous pettiness and completely enamored with watching his son grow and learn and become his own person. Slighted, Dante always made the boy suffer for Hohenheim's choices, and Hohenheim in turn would make every effort to make it up to the boy and shield him from his wife's insecurities as much as he could, creating a vicious cycle, with his golden child caught in the middle of it all.

That woman _really_ did not deserve this.

He'd wanted to tell his son no, to try to talk him out of the idea, but it was clear from his expression that he would not be deterred; he was determined to follow through with this, with or without his father's help.

"It's for Mother's birthday!" the all-together too willful eight year old insisted stubbornly, arms crossed and jaw set tightly as he waited for his father to give him the answer he clearly _wanted_ to hear, rather than the one he'd been hearing.

Hohenheim studied him over the edge of his book for a moment, then sighed and marked his place before setting the book aside. "All right," he relented, the thought that Dante did not deserve such devotion from her son echoing louder against the inside of his skull as the boy's face lit up triumphantly.

"Great! Come on, I've got everything all set up in the laboratory already," he said quickly, practically leaping forward and grabbing his father's hand, trying to tug him to his feet.

Hohenheim frowned as he let himself be dragged out of his chair. "_What_ all do you have set up?"

The boy paused and looked at him. "Hm? Oh, the silver and the copper ores and I got the flask with the mercury out-"

"William," Hohenheim interrupted him, tone stern as he pulled his hand back from his son's to take his glasses off his face and clean them on the edge of his shirt. William shrank back a bit in front of him at his name and Hohenheim had to bite his tongue to keep a spiteful and decidedly 'not for children's ears' word from slipping out at the way he recoiled. Dante had made the sound of his own name fearful to hear for him, with the way she used it as an insult whenever she addressed him.

Kneeling down to his level, he put his hands on the boy's shoulders gently. "Brian," he said with a gentler tone, using William's middle name to address him to leech a bit more of the sting out of his statement, "I know very well you're a capable boy in the laboratory, but you know that I don't want you handling the dangerous chemicals until-"

"But _Father_-"

"-_until_," he cut off his son's protests, "your hands have outgrown that clumsiness that _every_ child goes through." William seemed moderately, if begrudgingly, pacified by that statement. He rose back to his feet. "Now, let's go make this present of yours, shall we?"

He certainly had to give his son credit. The boy knew his way around a laboratory and knew exactly what chemicals he'd need for this project. They were carefully laid out with a meticulous precision, arranged by elemental weight with slips of paper with the required alchemical circles on the counters next to them. Hohenheim almost wanted to laugh at how very controlled and utterly _perfect_ it was.

William beamed proudly up at him. "See? Everything's ready."

He chuckled, patting his son's head affectionately. "It looks like you're well-prepared. We'll see if there's anything you've forgotten."

His son didn't seem all that pleased at the suggestion that he might've forgotten anything. "Everything's here and ready. I just need to show you what I want it to look like," he replied with a comically haughty tone for an eight-year-old. With that, he moved over to the counter nearest the door and flipped through a few papers before finally pulling out a single slip and handing it over to his father.

At first Hohenheim thought it was another alchemy circle, one far too familiar with its phoenix-like arrays swirling out from the center like wings of flame, then he realized it was actually a drawing of a locket with that circle merely inscribed on its cover.

William had certainly put a lot of thought into this present.

"Where did you get this array, Son?" he asked William over the top of the paper, raising an eyebrow and pushing his glasses up on his nose a bit.

The boy ducked his head a bit guiltily. "In your books," he admitted.

Hohenheim sighed heavily. "What have I told you about thos-"

"Oh, I know, Father, I know, I'm sorry, but I've read all the books you'll allow me to read already!" he protested.

Hohenheim studied him silently a moment, then crossed his arms, mindful of the drawing. Quietly, he looked over the materials his son had set out, mentally calculating everything there, looking for any missing pieces. "Why don't you go get what you want to put into this, and I'll make the crystal in the meantime?" he said gently, looking back at his son.

Seeing that he wasn't in trouble for going through his father's more forbidden tomes, at least for the moment, William agreed readily with a bob of his head and a quick exit from the room. Once he'd stepped out, Hohenheim pulled out a few more chemicals, setting them down and pulling the mercury over to him. His son had been close, he'd give him that, but he'd forgotten to account for a sealing chemical on the mercury sulfide to prevent poisoning.

He nearly smacked himself for entertaining the thought of not bothering with it.

Pushing the thought away, he quietly set to work.

That woman did not deserve her son.

The thought echoed louder and more insistently in his head as he stood back in the study, watching William present the locket proudly to Dante. It was a beautiful locket, to be certain, silver with inlaid cinnabar, the red stone forming the shape of an alchemical array that Dante had been trying to make work correctly for most of a century.

He watched his wife sharply over the top of his glasses, eyes slitted dangerously in warning. Dante didn't pay him any mind, looking at the locket in her hand with a coldly detached expression of disinterest, and opened it, a frown creasing her brow as she pulled the tiny object from within.

"What is this, William?" she demanded with a tightly controlled measure of faux gentleness.

Hohenheim's eyes narrowed further.

"It's ... it's the first tooth I lost," their son stammered nervously, half shrinking into his clothing under his mother's apparent displeasure at the gift. "That's traditional, I mean, for a mother's gift, right? And it's your birthday..." He frowned, biting his lip. It wasn't doing any good, he could obviously see that, and Hohenheim's heart ached for his son.

Dante gave the tooth another moment of scrutination, then set it back in the locket and closed the lid to the piece of jewelry. "Thank you, William," she said with a drawn smile that never came within a kilometer of her eyes, her tone carrying a lace of frost around its edges. "It's quite lovely."

That woman did not deserve that sort of devotion. If anything, she deserved a proper kick to her ass.

William seemed marginally encouraged by her words, ignoring the tone and he smiled weakly at her. "Thank you. I tried really hard to-"

"I'm going to go lay down for a bit, I think," she interrupted as if he had not spoken at all, giving a brief nod to Hohenheim before turning and leaving the room.

William was silent, watching her go, then glanced down at the ground as if she were standing there scolding him rather than leaving. After a moment, he lifted his head and looked at his father, and gave him a smile that looked more pained on his face than genuine. "I'll go finish cleaning up in the laboratory," he announced with a cheerful tone that masked the truth, if flimsily.

Hohenheim nodded in acknowledgment, watching him as he turned and left the room. He was trying far too hard to not let this apparent failure to earn his mother's love get to him, leaving something cold and bitter in the wake of his smile in his father's heart to watch it. With all the quiet danger of a predator stalking towards its prey, Hohenheim turned and followed after Dante to the bedroom she'd claimed for herself, isolated from everyone else in the household.

She was not readying to lay down, as he knew she wouldn't be. He stood in the doorway, blocking her path as she started for the door to leave. She paused and looked at him curiously, silently making a point of pretending to not know why he looked upset. He glanced to the dresser; the necklace was there, abandoned and already forgotten.

"Yes, dear?"

At her voice, saccharine with oversweetened bitterness, he looked back at her, expression as cold as any she'd ever worn since William was born. "I don't suppose you'll deign to wear that for even a day to humor your son?"

A smile slipped across her face, twisted and all together loathesome under the pristine perfection of it. "Of course not!" she practically _cooed_, and he had to fight a sneer off his face. "You know silver doesn't look good on me."

She tried to brush by him and he caught her arm with his hand. "He is your son, Dante. One day, you will regret treating him this way."

An almost girlish laugh, and she looked up at him, eyes twinkling with a dark parody of girlish amusement. "He is not my son," she corrected, "he is yours." Pulling her arm away from him, she slipped past him and left.

Once he could no longer hear her footsteps, he stepped into her room and moved over to the dresser purposefully, snatching the locket off of it and tucking it safely into his pocket.

That woman did not deserve it.


End file.
